World Puzzle Championship: Day 4
More food for thought and for our man on the spot.
Got up. Ate croissants. Stuck things into a potato. Went back to bed.
Everybody had been looking forward to the first challenge on day four: round six was the infamous "Mr. Potato Head" team contest. Teams of four each had two and a half hours (lengthened from two hours simply because there was so much to do!) to solve twelve puzzles, each of which generated two or three digits.
We then had to use these digits collected together to decide which combination of hat, eyes, ears, moustache, arms and feet to plug into our plastic pal - but only a completely correct collection of answers would guarantee the full information required to assemble the appropriate appendages.
The twelve puzzles on offer were rather more lateral than the others we had faced; often working out exactly what was required was the first stage of the problem. A particular standout here was a puzzle in which we had to assemble a collection of plastic figurines into "a meaningful arrangement" - it eventually turned out that the thicknesses of lines on the bottom of the figurines gave the solution.
A second similar problem suggested that a problem had been hidden somewhere among all the material distributed and offered no hints as to how it might yield digital answers; the trick here was to notice that some of the questions had been misnumbered in one of the four copies of the question booklets that had been handed out.
Possibly the most difficult of all the puzzles was a crossword in which there were rules to determine which of the squares should contain one letter and which others should contain two. The UK team surprised itself with which ones it managed to crack in the time limit - the joy of solving problems which at first looked completely impossible and impenetrable was never more clear than it was here.
Furthermore, it was great fun to be able to help each other out when we got stuck with problems and that caused three or four more solutions to fall into place. This was true teamwork in one of a small number of opportunities for it to occur.
The afternoon's final two rounds were the home straight of the contest: a short round seven asked you to add lines to three diagrams to maximise certain properties of them. The first of three problems here got you to maximise the number of equilateral triangles contained within the diagram, with the stipulation that you had to count them all up without missing any of the 70+ out.
Number two had us maximise the length of a path throughout a relatively bare crossword grid, though this path could only change direction under a few circumstances. The third contest measured your ability to dissect a stylised map of the state of Connecticut into as few squares as possible.
We finished off with a mixed bag of seventeen different puzzles, all quite different in nature, to be cracked in two and a half hours. We had started with an assortment of brainteasers and finished with a similar puzzle potpourri, ranging from assembling numbered tiles in a jigsaw to make correct equations, through guiding a block around a maze making sure that it never hung precariously over the edge of a canyon, to drawing a line through a honeycombed grid so to pass next to some cells three times but others four, five or six times.
It had been a hard and very full two days and people were starting to lose concentration by the end, buoyed by thoughts of how much they had achieved and the fun that they had all had.
One person who clearly hadn't lost concentration by the end was four-time World Puzzle Champion Wei-Hwa Huang (USA), who managed to confound all the puzzle-setters by solving an unprecedented sixteen of the seventeen questions in this final round, despite the intention of the setters to provide so many problems that it would take the typical participant several times the time limit to unravel them all.
His efforts earned him 400 points for the round out of a possible 425. The fact that nobody else earned more than 290 on the same paper shows the magnitude of his achievement, a country mile ahead of a strong field of competitors.
Sixty-eight of the seventy-eight competitors finished their championships at this point, with all competitors great and small, plus team captains, judges, question setters and other invitees attending a very leisurely six-course banquet (salad, chicken kebabs, shrimp, pasta dishes and a selection of meats, with cake and coffee to finish) at a local ranch-style restaurant. Stories, games and trivia were shared as people finally felt free to let their hair down.
The story ends here for the British team, who had gratifyingly managed to gain a place with our strong teamwork in the "Potato Appeal" contest. We overtook the Slovakian team to finish in what we feel to be a very respectable fourteenth place, finishing ahead of some WPC veteran nations and some highly-fancied newcomers. The full results will be on the official World Puzzle Championship site.
Our star performer was Nick Deller whose 491 points saw him finishing 33rd out of the 78 placed competitors to fulfil his lofty ("and extremely hopeful" - Nick) self-imposed target of a top-half performance in his first appearance.
I was the low scorer on the British team with 237 points, but am proud not just of having beaten 14 other finalists to finish 64th in the world but also of the problems which I had solved, many of which I thought would completely elude me, in order to get there.
Lionel Wright scored 301 to finish 59th and MSO 1 Pentamind champion Ken Wilshire scored 342, which was good for 54th place - though he regrets a few careless slips which would have promoted him to 45th!
All smiles in the British camp, then, not only for some unexpected and pleasant surprises in terms of cracking very difficult puzzles but also for quickly and successfully blending together as a team which worked together well.
We look forward to learning a lot more about puzzles over the coming year, trying to qualify again for the British team for the 2001 World Puzzle Championship (set for Brno in the Czech Republic; the 2002 event will be in the university town of Oulu in northern Finland) and getting enough experience to help us improve sufficiently to earn a place in the top ten.
Or maybe higher? Watch this space!
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